What's going on with fertility?

My comments on a Marginal Revolution post that linked to this Der Spiegel article about the ROI of different forms of fertility subsidies. (As of 2010, German fertility rates were 1.39 despite sizeable subsidies for family formation.)

Reshuffled my comments to make for easier contiguous reading:

What I take away from the German article is that people REALLY don’t want to get married – or rather, [people really don't want to] avoid single parenthood. Thus bribing them to have two-parent households is really expensive. If you want to increase your birthrate, the argument goes, subsidizing single motherhood + work instead has a better ROI because that’s what people want to do anyway.

Let that sink in for a moment. Somehow, in the last few generations, the traditional family model that people have been eagerly perpetuating for centuries has suddenly become incredibly unappealing. People don’t want to get get married, and women in an incredibly wealthy country would rather add a little additional income rather than spend time raising their children. (Whatever happened to diminishing marginal utility of money?)

There’s good evidence that kids were never a good economic bet, only less-negative than they were today. (As a thought experiment, why not hire labor when you need it?) And the ancients had reasonably good birth control, and were willing to use it if they really wanted to: see here. So if the ancients did want to avoid having kids…maybe they couldn’t avoid having them altogether, but they could have leaned very strongly towards having fewer and later kids, and we’d see historical evidence of that preference. That is not the case.

Us vs. them may explain a little but it doesn’t seem to be the most useful theory here. I’d think more along the lines of superstimuli. Children of pretty physically fit ancestors become obese when they get a nutritional superstimulus – like a candy bar – that tastes more sweet than real food could possibly be.

Some form of cultural-status superstimulus is suddenly making career jockeying more appealing than family for both sexes. (Imagine a peasant saying “yeah, I could have kids, but I’d want to work hard until I’m 35 and get a few more oxen like the neighbors before I want to take that step, you know?”) Similarly, for women, somehow “doing mostly boring office work” has become more appealing than “doing sometimes boring childcare work” despite the fact that, again, we know that a little extra income in rich countries doesn’t actually produce much happiness.

Conservatives need to realize that the cultural ground has mysteriously shifted under their feet and they’re up against a huge, evolutionary novel change in social attitudes and that a handful of measly tax breaks is a ridiculously underpowered tool to prevent it. Liberals need to realize that something really powerful and strange is going on and that in the long run, there's no reason to believe that these forces are necessarily friendly to the liberal – or the human – project.